About Hope

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I'm the author of five nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters, Motherless Mothers, and the memoir The Possibility of Everything. Motherless Daughters was started when I was still a graduate student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Since then, my articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Self, Glamour, Writer's Digest, Parade, and Real Simple, and my essays have been anthologized in books ranging from The Bitch in the House to Blindsided by a Diaper to Racing in the Street: A Bruce Springsteen Reader (which, as a lifelong Springsteen fan, I find wonderful and hilarious at the same time).

I've been teaching nonfiction writing for more than 20 years, at universities and programs including the University of Iowa, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, UCLA Extension, Antioch University-LA, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, where I can be found every July. Over the years, I've been a featured speaker at many conferences and literary festivals, including the LA Times Festival of Books in Los Angeles, the Miami Book Fair, Portland's Wordstock Literary Festival, the University of Iowa's NonfictioNow conference, and multiple Associated Writing Program annual conferences around the country.

I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to work with many, many talented and hardworking students over the years, a number of whom have gone on to write their own books. They've been published by Random House, William Morrow, Penguin/Putnam, Perseus Books, Simon and Schuster, Bloomsbury Books, Basic Books, MacAdam/Cage, the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen,  USA Today, and The Alaska Quarterly, among others. Please look at the "Testimonials" page to see what they say about our time together.

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